Hard Rain

by Ariel Dorfman

Dorfman's innovative novel encompasses and expands on his first full-length fiction, published in Spanish after Chile's coup in 1973 and unpublished in English. Thus it looks back at the artistic and political experimentation of the Allende period from this leading writer's tragic perspective on Chile today.

Genres: Fiction

250 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1990

About the author

Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina since 1985.

Reviews

[Andy]

Postmodern fiction, eat your heart out. Right from the core of the Allende revolution, with presentiments of Pinochet and a tangling of narrative unequaled in its haunting character.

[Sophie]

About fifty pages in, I wondered if this book was secretly brilliant, and I just wasn't clever enough to get it. But after reading every tortuous page, I've decided I don't care - I don't think it's brilliant. There's no plot, and I'm not even sure there are characters. The highlight - and I'll use that term very loosely - was the apparent interview with Dorfman hiding around page 250, in which Dorfman notes that this book was becoming "a bunch of illegible garbage" (his words, not mine - see page 249). Thanks for still deciding to publish it. Do yourself a favor and skip this anomaly in Dorfman's repertoire.